Greek Philosophers in the Arabic Tradition

Professor Gutas deals here with the lives, sayings, thought, and doctrines of Greek philosophers drawn from sources preserved in medieval Arabic translations and for the most part not extant in the original. The Arabic texts, some of which are edited here for the first time, are translated throughout and richly annotated with the purpose of making the material accessible to classical scholars and historians of ancient and medieval philosophy. Also discussed are the modalities of transmission from Greek into Arabic, the diffusion of the translated material within the Arabic tradition, the nature of the Arabic sources containing the material, and methodological questions relating to Graeco-Arabic textual criticism. The philosophers treated include the Presocratics and minor schools such as Cynicism, Plato, Aristotle and the early Peripatos, and thinkers of late antiquity. A final article presents texts on the malady of love drawn from both the medical and philosophical (problemata physica) traditions.

Dimitri Gutas is Professor of Arabic and Graeco-Arabic at Yale University, USA where he studies and teaches classical Arabic and the pre-modern intellectual tradition in Islamic civilization. In addition to his lexicographical interests in Graeco-Arabic studies, he has devoted a large part of his scholarly career to the edition and study of Greek philosophical texts translated into Arabic and their influence in the Islamic world. In this field he has published Greek Wisdom Literature in Arabic Translation. A Study of the Graeco-Arabic Gnomologia (New Haven 1975), Greek Philosophers in the Arabic Tradition (Aldershot, Hampshire 2000), and has been involved from the beginning as co-editor in Project Theophrastus. Within Arabic philosophy, he has concentrated in particular on its greatest exponent, Ibn Sina (known as Avicenna in the medieval Latin world), on whom he wrote the fundamental Avicenna and the Aristotelian Tradition and Introduction to Reading Avicenna's Philosophical Works.

Contents: Presocratics and Minor Schools: Pre-Plotinian philosophy in Arabic (other than Platonism and Aristotelianism): a review of the sources; Sayings by Diogenes preserved in Arabic; Adrastus of Aphrodisias, (Pseudo-) Cebes, Democrates 'Gnomicus', and Diogenes the Cynic in the Arabic sources; Plato: Plato's Symposion in the Arabic tradition; Galen's Synopsis of Plato's Laws and Farabi's Talhis; Aristotle and the early peripatos: The spurious and the authentic in the Arabic Lives of Aristotle; The life, works, and sayings of Theophrastus in the Arabic tradition; Eudemus in the Arabic tradition; Late antiquity and the interface between Greek and Arabic: Paul the Persian on the classification of the parts of Aristotle's philosophy: a milestone between Alexandria and Baghdad; The starting point of philosophical studies in Alexandrian and Arabic Aristotelianism; Philoponus and Avicenna on the separability of the intellect: a case of Orthodox Christian - Muslim agreement; The malady of love (in collaboration with Hans Hinrich Biesterfeldt); Index.